Category: Training

Last week I mentioned the public training courses that I’ll be running in London next February. A couple of people got in touch and asked if I had more details of the contents of the courses. That makes sense of course, I don’t expect people to pay £300 for a days training without knowing a bit about the syllabus.

So here are details of the first two courses (the Moose one and the DBIx::Class one). I hope to have details of the others available by next weekend.

Object Oriented Programming with Perl and Moose

Introduction to Object Oriented programming

Overview of Moose

Object Attributes

Subclasses

Object construction

Data types

Delegation

Roles

Meta-programming

Further information

Database Programming with Perl and DBIx::Class

Brief introduction to relational databases

Introduction to databases and Perl

DBI

ORM

Schema Classes

Basic DB operations

CRUD

Advanced queries

Ordering, joining, grouping

Extending DBIC

Further information

If you have any further questions, please either ask them in the comments or email me (I’m dave at this domain).

And if I’ve sold you on the idea of these courses, the booking page is now open.

For several years I’ve been running an annual set of public training courses in London in conjunction with FLOSS UK (formerly known as UKUUG). For various scheduling reasons, we didn’t get round to running any this year, but we have already made plans for next year.

I’ll be running five days of training in central London from 8th – 12th February. The courses will take place at the Ambassador’s Hotel on Upper Woburn Place. Full details are in the process of appearing on the FLOSS UK web site, but the booking page doesn’t seem to be live yet, so I can’t tell you how much it will cost.

We’re doing something a little different this year. In previous years, I’ve been running two generic two-day courses – one on intermediate Perl and one on advanced Perl. This year we’re running a number of shorter but more focussed courses. The complete list is:

This new approach came out of some feedback we’ve received from attendees over the last couple of years. I’m hoping that by offering this shorter courses, people will be able to take more of a “mix and match” approach and will select courses that better fit their requirements. Of course, if you’re interested, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t come to all five days.

I’ll update this page when I know how much the courses will cost and how you can book. But please put these dates in your calendar.

Update: And less than 24 hours after publishing this blog post, the booking page has gone live.

Places are £300 a day (so £600 for the two-day course on web programming) and there’s a special offer of £1,320 for the full week.

A few weeks ago I got an interesting email from someone at Udemy. They were looking for someone to write a beginners Perl tutorial that they would make available for free on their web site. I think I wasn’t the only person that they got in touch with but, after a brief email conversation, they asked me to go ahead and write it.

It turned out to be harder that I thought it would be. I expected that I could write about 6,000 words over a weekend. In the end it took two weekends and it stretched to over 8,000 words. The problem is not in the writing, it’s in deciding what to omit. I’m sure that if you read it you’ll find absolutely essential topics that I haven’t included – but I wonder what you would have dropped to make room for them.

But eventually I finished it, delivered it to them (along with an invoice – hurrah!) and waited to hear that they had published it.

Yesterday I heard that it was online. Not from Udemy (they had forgotten to tell me that it was published two weeks ago) but from a friend.

Unfortunately, some gremlins had crept in at some point during their publication pipeline. Some weird character substitutions had taken place (which had disastrous consequences for some of the Perl code examples) and a large number of paragraph breaks had vanished. But I reported those all to Udemy yesterday and I see they have all been fixed overnight.

So finally I can share the tutorial with you. Please feel free to share it with people who might find it useful.

Although it’s 8,000 words long, it really only scratches the surface of the language. Udemy have added a link to one of their existing Perl courses, but unfortunately it’s not a very good Perl course (Udemy don’t seem to have any very good Perl courses). I understand why they have done that (that is, after all, the whole point of commissioning this tutorial – to drive more people to pay for Perl courses on tutorial) but it’s a shame that there isn’t anything of higher quality available.

So there’s an obvious hole in Udemy’s offerings. They don’t have a high quality Perl course. That might be a hole that I try to fill when I next get some free time.

It’s been a while since I’ve run a training course alongside a YAPC. By my calculations, the last time was Riga in 2011. But I’ve been talking to the organisers of this year’s conference and we have plan.

I’m going to be running a one-day introductory course on DBIx::Class before the conference (I think it’ll be on 1st September, but that’s not 100% certain yet). Full details are on the conference web site. There’s an early-bird price of 150 Euro and the full price is 200 Euro. The web site says that the early-bird price finishes today, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that gets extended for a few days at least.

Of course, readers of this blog will all already be experts in DBIC and won’t need this course. But I’m sure that most of you will have a colleague who would benefit from… well… a refresher on who DBIC works. Why not see if your company will pay for them to attend the course 🙂

The course size is limited. So you might want to think about booking soon.

Then the week after I’m running two two-day courses in conjunction with FLOSS UK. On Tuesday 11th and Wednesday 12th it’s “Intermediate Perl” and on Thursday 13th and Friday 14th it’s “Advanced Perl Techniques”. Full details and a booking for are on the FLOSS UK web site.

Note: If you’re interested in the FLOSS UK courses, then please don’t pay the eye-watering non-member price (£720!) Simply join FLOSS UK (which costs £42) and then pay the member price of £399.